The Lonely World

Sometimes life just feels like a whirlwind I can never get ahead of. Bills, work, meds, treatment, food shopping, vet visits… I’m at a standoff between continuing my treatment and feeding myself. I keep thinking I can do it without the meds. But i just tried for six months and now the fantasies are back. They’re urges to harm myself in the strangest ways… Sticking my head in a blender, cutting the skin off my eyelids, thumb tacks in my feet. I don’t act on them, but the longer they linger the more maddening it is. I just try to go to sleep and end up in tears about I can’t handle it and shouldn’t have been born. I’m really good at convincing myself my parents would rather I died years ago. Everything is so hopeless sometimes. And getting back on medicine is hard. It hasn’t been in my budget for so long, and the side effects are awful, and it feels like I’m not myself all the time. Like half my brain has been shut off. And i know a lot of that half of my brain I’m better off without, but I think that half of my brain is also where I can draw, and cook, and bake things, and lay in the sun staring at the patterns the leaves make against the sky. On meds, I just wake up, and go to work, and come home. I’m so alone, and in my lonliness I can’t even bring myself to do something to pass the time. It’s not living. Not that being afraid Ill lie in the road in the middle of the night and wait for a car to run me over is living either… I often find the only reason I’m still here is because my pets depend on me. I talk to them more than to people. They don’t think I’m stand-offish, uncomfortable to be around, or a target for society’s social ladder. I’m just a larger version of them, with food. They sleep on my pillow and at my feet and lick me good morning. I wish I could find a human with that same amount of care, or lack of judgment, or whatever it is that makes animals so unafraid of me. Even people with troubled dogs are always amazed how they act around me. Maybe they know I just need a friend and reach out.